6 ms·

In an alternative timeline, Firefox makes their context menu really short and someone writes a blog post ranting about how it deprives functionality from power

• NoboruWataya 7mo ago
  My first thought reading this was "it's amazing what some people can get angry about".
  • wolvoleo 7mo ago
    I sure hated it when windows 11 dumbed down the explorer context menu. Lots of stuff I used to do a lot now took 2 clicks instead of one. Luckily it can simply be switched off.
• mantra2 7mo ago
  You can please some of the people, some of the time.
• heraldgeezer 7mo ago
  Yes, I for one love all the options... dont hide menus from me, I have a big screen.
  • behringer 7mo ago
    The trick is adding letter selections so you can press the underlined letter on your keyboard and get that option! You can do things really quickly that way!
  • somat 7mo ago
    It's the duality of user interface design. Two forces at war with each other. The professional interface is a complete mess. flat not nested, functionality duplicated all over the place, widgets strewn across the screen like a toddler just got done playing legos. Exactly what one needs when they will be working with it for hours at end. Contrast with the casual interface, nested, one way to do things, neat compartments for everything. What is needed to gently guide the user through an unfamiliar task they may only do once a year. And this is ignoring the dark side, the "designer" interface. Where it just has look good functionality be damned. Take note. The big lie about design is that it exists in a vacuum, that there can be an independent design title. Real design is fundamentally a holistic process that has to consider and integrate all aspects. Including deep engineering. A real designer is an engineer with taste, a rare find to be sure.
    • elxr 7mo ago
      > The professional interface is a complete mess. flat not nested, functionality duplicated all over the place, widgets strewn across the screen like a toddler just got done playing legos. Exactly what one needs when they will be working with it for hours at end. Neovim users disagree.
      • somat 7mo ago
        It's flat (technically modal, but that does not make it more casual) interface with everything as invisible hotkeys and a near command line interface (the legos all over the place, actually in this case a better analogy would be legos all over the place under water in a bathtub) no, it fits.
    • terminalshort 7mo ago
      And then the professional never uses it anyway because he knows all the shortcut keys!
• mikkupikku 7mo ago
  I really wish they'd just make it easily customizable. I don't care if lay-users might mess it up and get confused, such users abandoned Firefox years ago anyway.
  • wtallis 7mo ago
    Mozilla should really try taking their extension ecosystem seriously, and deliver features like the AI chatbot integration as first-party extensions that come pre-installed but can be easily managed by users with a much better UI than about:config.
    • mikkupikku 7mo ago
      Apparently they've recently added a first party side bar for LLM integration, but I haven't tried it out yet.
      • wtallis 7mo ago
        Yes, that's one of the things that really should have been an extension. Tree Style Tab works alright as an extension-provided sidebar. Putting the chat or sidebar in the core of the browser sounds very much like something done by a developer who wasn't around for Mozilla prior to Firefox, and isn't aware of the original goal of being the antithesis of the browser that included everything and the kitchen sink.
    • ziml77 7mo ago
      And then people would complain about Firefox being bloated with all these built-in extensions. And then if you don't pre-install them people will complain about needing to add all of these extra extensions.
      • bluebarbet 7mo ago
        Indeed, and this argument ("it will be too bloated") is often used by developers themselves to avoid (or hide) advanced features. I never quite understood it. Just put all the mysterious flags behind an "Advanced" menu, which normie users will know not to touch.
• w0m 7mo ago
  yea... I would consider it a ux regression to do the OPs tweaks. To each their own; glad it's an option :)
• autoexec 7mo ago
  How about Firefox just not fill their context menu with bullshit bloat and ads for shit nobody asked for like google lens and make it fully/easily customizable so that most users are happy and power users can add whatever they want. It's pretty damn easy to make everyone happy.
  • OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
    It literally already is fully customizable. between userChrome, about:config, and extensions, you can do literally anything you like to your right click menu on Firefox.
    • autoexec 7mo ago
      I'd argue that you shouldn't need third party add-ons plus modifications to both userChrome and about:config to do it, so it could be easier. A "Customize Context Menu" under Edit would be nice and easy for even regular users to discover and take advantage of.
      • sfink 7mo ago
        Why is my Edit menu so long? What is this "Customize Context Menu" thing that I never use, or will use at most once a year? Just kidding, but it does illustrate that there's always a tradeoff with these things. (I would like to have the ability to customize the context menu too, fwiw, though it's not as straightforward as the other customizable bits of UI since the context menu is, well, contextual.)
    • grayhatter 7mo ago
      about:config where you need a search engine to find all the key strings does not count as easy in this context. And it's unreasonable to pretend it is.
  • john_strinlai 7mo ago
    >makes it fully/easily customizable so that most users are happy [...] It's pretty damn easy to make everyone happy. considering that it is already fully customizable, yet you are still complaining about it, i dont think so
• Snortibartfast 7mo ago
  Or you could do like Vivaldi, and have every menu configurable :)
  • darkwater 7mo ago
    Which adds more UI to control the feature as well, which someone will find ugly and unnecessary.
• grayhatter 7mo ago
  This isn't as simple as making everyone happy. It's about the disrespect of not asking. Could Firefox have asked if users wanted to enable AI features? Of course they could have, did they? Of course not, just think about how would asking would effect the shareholders!! I don't disagree with the premise that it's hard to make everyone happy, but the problem isn't about pleasing everyone, it's about treating users with respect, and not jumping on the AI everywhere bandwagon, without asking first. Especially because Firefox has billed itself as privacy protecting, and AI is definitely not privacy focused. One might even say, privacy violating... From the privacy focused browser...
  • abtinf 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  • agwa 7mo ago
    The blog post is also complaining about the options to create a screenshot, copy a link to a text fragment, copy a link without trackers, debug accessibility issues, auto-fill a form, and even to print the page. Also, Mozilla Corporation's sole "shareholder" is the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation.
    • brynnbee 7mo ago
      I have never used any of those in a right click context menu in my entire 20 years of using Firefox
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • terminalshort 7mo ago
    Could they have asked me if I wanted to enable 100 different browser features? Yes they could have, but why would they b/c that's incredibly annoying. If you don't like it you don't have to use it. The AI option doesn't send anything to the server unless you explicitly tell it to, so that is 100% compatible with a privacy focused browser.
  • 7mo ago
• NoSalt 7mo ago
  Maybe what the author is saying is that Firefox should make it much easier to configure these "options".
• godelski 7mo ago
  > It's sure hard to make everyone happy. I definitely think this is a hard task and it's pretty apparent with Firefox. I mean no matter what they do people are going to be very vocal and upset about it. But to talk more generally, I think finding the balance of what options to expose to normal users and then how to expose things to power users is quite challenging. I think a big mistake people make is to just ignore power users and act like that just because they're a small percentage of users that they aren't important[0]. I think what makes computers so successful is the fact that computers aren't really a product designed "for everyone," instead, they're built as environments that can be turned into a thing that anyone needs. Which is why your power users become important and in a way, why this balance is hard to strike because in some sense every user is a power user. Nobody has the same programs installed on their computers, nobody has the same apps installed on their phones, each and every device is unique. You give them the power to make it their own, and that's the only way you can truly build something that works for everyone. This is why I think computers are magic! But I think we've lost this idea. We've been regressing to the mean. The problem is when you create something for everybody you end up making something for nobody. [0] I think Jack Conte (Patreon/Pomplamoose) explains it well here. It's the subset that is passionate that are often your greatest ally. No matter what you sell, most of the money comes from a small subset of buyers. The same is true with whatever metric we look at. As a musician a small subset of listeners are the ones that introduce you to the most people, buy the most merch, and all that that makes you successful. It's not the average "user" but the "power user". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zUndMfMInc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zUndMfMInc At 13:00 he quotes Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired) and I think it captures the thesis of this talk In the age of the internet, you don't need millions of fans to be successful. If you can just find 1000 people who are willing to buy $100 of stuff from you per year, that's $100k/yr.
  • adithyassekhar 7mo ago
    In the smartphone world it's the same until it's not https://youtu.be/FJgTKx-rg18?si=PhgMQ_cDkR7vMQfC https://youtu.be/FJgTKx-rg18?si=PhgMQ_cDkR7vMQfC
• 6510 7mo ago
  I had a dumb phone once that got it right. It had one fixed menu entry called "advanced menu" this replaces the menu with one that has everything (except from "advanced menu" which is replaced with "simple menu"). One of the menu entries is "configure simple menu". This opens the same looking menu as "advanced menu" only clicking any functionality toggles a check mark in front of it. If a sub menu had less than 3 options it is merged into the parent menu. One plays with it for a bit and before long it becomes a Japanese celebration of emptiness. It even had a bunch of sort of redundant options. The sms submenu had something like 8 options of which I only really used "new message" and "all messages" but you could go for "unread messages". It's not like the rest of the menu is gone, its all under "advanced menu". If the right click menu worked like that some would bother to further configure the simple menu and one could share their config. To make it clear it is not a "more" button "advanced" could fold out the hidden entries like a harmonica.
• weaksauce 7mo ago
  I don't know what I've done to have a small right click menu but mine is only a handful of options and I even tried selecting an image and a link and some text to get all the options.
• eviks 7mo ago
  This is just a silly excuse to do nothing to clean your garbage. Easy customization with thoughtful defaults is an easy way to make everyone happy > how it deprives functionality from power users. That's already the case, so nothing changes here to justify the current situation
  • pseudohadamard 7mo ago
    TFA pretty much summed it up with: Completely useless. Thanks for showing me every feature you’ve ever shipped And that's what it is, we'll just use the right-click menu as a garbage dump for every feature we've added. I've currently got my right-click menu down to eight entries, of which four are extensions I added (NoScript, DownThemAll, etc), and the four built-in ones are things I've never, ever used in 20+ years as a Firefox user. I'm also running RightLinks which turns right clicks on a link into "Open in New Tab", which is what I want to do, oh, approximately 100% of the time I right-click on a link (for the epsilon times I don't want to do that you can override with Ctrl-Click to get the original menu back). Its actually painful watching users who haven't overridden the Firefox builtins use right-click, "right-click, scroll, scroll, pause to check, scroll, click".
• Groxx 7mo ago
  Also consistency. I personally hate entries appearing and disappearing (e.g. "copy clean link"), I would much rather have a stable UI with disabled elements if something is sometimes relevant to invisible context (like href attributes). Otherwise you get "where is X? It was here yesterday!" issues, and those are practically impossible to figure out if you don't already know why it behaves that way. At least a disabled entry tells you "this exists, it just isn't applicable" rather than "lol what? maybe we removed it".